Listening to Our Secret Place

Listening to Our Secret Place

By Bill Ryan

When I was 21 in a moment of crisis, when I called for help, the help came in the form of a memory. I remembered my life as a young boy of three and four years old. I remember that I found a way to experience peace and healing, in a sometimes troubled childhood. In one vivid memory I am in one of my hiding places, in the tall grass behind my grandmother's chicken house. And I am sitting so no one can see me, with my eyes closed and there deep within there is a spacious silence where I am surrounded by a peaceful and wonderful Presence.

In this re-membering was the beginning of my spiritual journey as an adult. Later on when my own daughter was a small child she would join my wife and me in a short meditation before we went to bed. She would ring the gong and sit on her cushion, and follow the simple guidance we gave to "be very quiet and listen to her secret place."

This secret place is in all of us; it is the locus of our communion with the Divine Beloved. The foundation of the Celtic Christian tradition is based on this simple wisdom, listening to our secret place, the Center of our being, where God lives. The Celtic Christians, with their culture of nature mysticism, understood that it was the beloved disciple, John, who experienced the deep communion with Jesus, when as scripture says, he lay his cheek on the breast of Christ and listened to the beat of his heart. And for them this was the source of all spiritual life, healing, and peace. By listening to the Heartbeat of God we attune our own soul to the Divine. We can all do this. This deep listening and attunement to the Heartbeat of God in our own heart center is the central interior movement towards the condition of Shalom, the biblical word for inner peace and harmony in Creation. Shalom means the state of well being that comes from being in harmony with God's Spirit within us.

The Center
One of my teachers along the way, the Benedictine monk, John Main, spoke of this secret place inside, "Returning to the Center within us, is the gateway to the Center of All."

The mystic spiral is the universal symbol of the Center. The great Wisdom traditions of the world have different names for this Center. In Buddhism it is called Buddha nature, in Hinduism, Atman. In Christianity the traditional biblical name is the Image of God within us. In the Desert tradition of Christianity it is called "the spiritual Heart" not to be confused with our emotional or anatomical heart.

So this inner peace is a state, it is a state of communion with our Divine Beloved, an original state, a state of being Home, in the locus of our belonging. This is the state that Jesus invites us to, the peace that worldly human culture cannot give us. In our deep listening to our secret place we become the beloved disciple, as a small child, we enter the Kingdom and the Kingdom, the Realm of Communion enters us. In the Silence we listen and encounter "Jesus Christ, the Word which came out of Silence." ( St. Ignatius of Antioch) In the Middle Eastern Abrahamic Faiths this practice of going to the secret Center is called the Remembrance of God. It is an un-Forgetting, an uncovering and abiding in what is Real and Ultimate. The meaning of the word- "Re-membering," is making One, making whole, unifying. Just as I experienced at age 3 and age 21, and we can all experience today. We re-member who we are, and who God is at the Center, in the depths of us, by listening deeply to our secret place, and there we find true peace and wholeness that the world cannot give.

In the year 2000 while on retreat at a monastery in the mountains of Colorado I met a monk, named Theophane. He has since died. But he wrote a wonderful book called Tales of a Magic Monastery. He has said the stories are all true, not literally but metaphorically. The story is called "The Original Sound." It goes like this:

I asked an old monk, "How long have you been here?"
"Forever," he answered. " I smiled.
"Fifty years, Father?"
"Forever."
Did you know St. Benedict?"
"We are novices together."
"Did you know Jesus?"
"He and I converse every day."
I threw away my silly smile, fell to my knees, and clutched his hand.
"Father, " I whispered, "Did you hear the original sound?"
" I am listening to the original sound."

The original sound is the heartbeat of God. And we can listen to it there at the Center, in our secret place.